GRC and its inception

Research in the areas of Geocomputation and Geomatics takes different forms and can be located alternatively in numerous academic disciplines such as Geodetic Science, Geology, Geography or other spatial information processing groups.   The research group at AUT University is located within the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.    The researchers are all principally computer scientists but variously have adjunct backgrounds in mathematics, physics, biology, forestry and electrical engineering.  The previous work of members in the research group have been in geophysics, environmental modelling, artificial intelligence, signal processing, speech, text, and image processing, together with computational methods for complex data analysis, visualisation and software engineering.  Some members of the group worked together before the formal ‘centre’ was established and some are new.   The membership, based at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), is international and currently has academics and scientists from five countries and numerous industry research and development groups, with business and government research establishment participation.

The group was established in August 2007 as a response to a project proposal for a collaborative investigation between researchers in New Zealand, Chile and the United States.  This has now extended also to participants from Uruguay and Japan.   The baseline interest for work in this area of Geocomputation and Geomatics is an outgrowth from a long standing research association between principal researchers at AUT and UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara), in particular the Alexandria Digital Library Project in the Map and Imagery Laboratory at UCSB.   But the principal project now being worked on by the GRC team in Auckland, is the result of a collaboration between  the AUT group and others in the Faculty of Engineering at the Catholic University in Talca, Chile Universidad Catolica del Maule.This site contains descriptions of the work of members of the GRC in environmental modelling, remote sensing and image processing, data and audio mining, computational methods for data analysis and result depiction.